Those of you who share my support for the struggle against illegitimate power and privilege will have been delighted by the defeat last week in single combat of that decadent Spanish aristocrat, Rubén Ramírez Hidalgo, by a humble English poultry farmer, Tim Henman. (As you know, hidalgo (“nobleman”) is but a concertina arrangement of hijo [...]

It’s not very long, but just try saying it. (Found in the Dutch section of this page while updating this page. It refers to the apprentice of the guy who makes the keyholes for the locks on the collars of greyhounds. Or whatever: I’m not an expert in Dutch canine bondage products.)

Says Marwan Issam from his computer games stall in a centre of Sunni terrorism:

The French section of Squat.net is brilliant. It’s where you publish stories that reveal even more of the *real* truth than Indymob can take. For example, the neoliberal press claims that Sant Joan, the local midsummer night feast, passed off without trouble. Wrong! Fist informs us that

Following the post on evidence in Barcelona of the relationship between Saddam and Alkiedoodah, I have had several interesting conversations with The Right Reverend Dom Gelul. His work (and I paraphrase the jacket of a book by Kamal Salibi):

Writes Vince Stankay of Florida in response to news of increased penalties for drunk drivers in Slovakia:

Usually when the Olympics come to town there’s a big clean-up, during which junkies with little muscles get kicked out to make way for junkies with big muscles. That’s what happened in Barcelona in 92, but from this op-ed piece by Costas Iordanidis in Kathimerini it sounds like the Greek government is not having it [...]

A new study, Fish intake during pregnancy in relation to offspring’s early cognitive development, shows that
women who ate fish regularly during pregnancy had children with better language and communication skills by the age of 18 months.
Interesting, then, that fishermen seem to be such silent ghits:

The cultural naivety of Irish political atavism is evident in this placard. NO RED CARPET FOR KILLER BUSH, it says. Smart opponents would have tried to change the meaning of the red from whatever it originally was to reflect the blood which they would have us believe Bush is spilling needlessly.

Yesterday I received a letter from Holland whose relevance was diminished somewhat by its having been stored for four weeks en route, presumably here in Barcelona. Correos, the Spanish post service, is one of the many relics of a culture that Francis Bacon described four centuries ago:

Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example,

Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English.
What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich in ers [...]

It will be of particular interest to the deranged conspiracy theorists who make up roughly half of Barcelona’s population that there is a shop called Goma 2 (Goma 2 was the explosive used in the Madrid massacre) just a couple of blocks up from a beer factory called Sadamm (or however you spell it):

One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times:

chinuk-wawa
english

QHata Nayka
How are [...]

“Then the monsignor left the altar and told us that we could start killing the Jews.”

Where boring old Ulster farmers just used to store A for horses, Dutch farmers would park that shiny new Mercedes where the tax inspector couldn’t see it. Catalan farmers however are undisputed champions when it comes to the creative use of their barns:

This type of soil has no market value, so the only explanation that [...]

One of the principal flaws in the Vatican’s claims that the Inquisition was not really all that bad is the supposition that the distance that now exists in Spain between church and state was also present when torturing and burning women was the norm. It’s possible that the Spanish state tortured and burnt more than [...]

I know more Catalan geology than most trombonists, but this paper, Stratigraphy and petrology of the Miocene Montjuïc delta, was an absolute revelation (and I’m not just trying to demonstrate to you what a smart git I am). The graphics and tables are lousy quality, but from now on the text is kind of compulsory [...]

Mad Andy has a good old laugh at The Guardian for writing that

The mini-site called Barcelona Chronicle – which someone presumably gets paid to produce – is an example of just how bad non-native translation can get. If you were to generate the page automatically then you’d probably have a similar percentage of incorrect words but the spelling would be better.

There was a sad report on the Beeb last week about the Woodwards from Guernsey who were robbed by a gang on the A7 near Tarragona after having a tyre shot out:
The incident is the third of its type in the area in the last month. Spanish authorities believe the shooting of car tyres is [...]